During the last years the best art fairs have been working like Swiss watches and creating a long series of minor market-exhibitions, much smaller but often with very attractive proposals.  Many art lovers, even very wealthy ones, visit them all, in search of new Damien Hirsts to invest on.  It may be for this reason that the big market-exhibitions of contemporary art have become inaccessible places where the richest men of the planet arrive with their private jets, ready to sign six-zero cheques to take home masterpieces by great masters and works by the trendiest contemporary artists.

Damien Hirst’s 111.5 million-pound ($199 million) record auction in London last month marks the top of the art market in the U.K., for now at least, according to a survey by valuers.
At the time that Hirst was grabbing headlines, the collapse in real-estate sales in the U.K. was taking its toll on prices of lower-value art and antiques, said the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
“The credit crunch and bank collapses are slowing down the markets, as is the falling house market”, said Simon Jones of Oxfordshire auctioneers Jones & Jacob, who was quoted in the survey. “It will get worse as the recession continues. That said, best quality lots are finding buyers at good prices”.
Auction houses are watching for signs of how their sales will perform in London and New York in the next two months. Even wealthy art buyers may be deterred by the Sept. 15 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., tumbling stock markets and slowing economic growth, said dealers.
A net balance of 34 percent more auctioneers and valuers reported prices falling for items estimated at 1,000 pounds and below in the quarterly survey completed last month. By contrast, a balance of 39 percent reported that prices rose for more expensive works of 50,000 pounds and higher as wealthy people snapped up trophy art. Contemporary art registered the strongest growth, with 41 percent more surveyors reporting increased prices. (Bloomberg)

Charles Saatchi is synonymous with the revival in British art in the 1990s. The collector introduced the world to Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst’s shark. His Saatchi-style is a recognizable genre: it’s visceral, figurative, sometimes shocking.
Today, the advertising executive opens his new gallery to reporters - after three years largely absent from the London exhibition scene.
The Saatchi Gallery on King’s Road, Chelsea, formally opens on Oct. 9. It is a triumph, architecturally at least. The first exhibition, “The Revolution Continues: New Art from China” is exactly what we have come to expect from Saatchi shows. How much you like it will depend on your taste for bold imagery and old - fashioned figurative painting.
While much contemporary art is cool and cerebral, Saatchi favors subject matter that nobody could possibly mistake. A sculpture by Liu Wei, “Indigestion II”, represents a pile of excrement two meters across. Wei’s offering is undeniably - in fact inescapably - visceral. Saatchi-type art often is. (Bloomberg)

Three weeks after Damien Hirst’s 111.5 million-pound ($206 million) auction at Sotheby’s, the artist will open a shop next door to the auction house in London.
The retail arm of Other Criteria, Hirst’s publishing and merchandising company, will start business at 36 New Bond Street on Oct. 6, said Robyn Katkhuda, projects director, in an e-mail.
Passersby will notice the black-painted facade of the shop to the left of Sotheby’s where the “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” auction was held.
“It’s a ’soft’ opening with no fanfare”, said Katkhuda. “The shop will have a selection of pieces from our Web site”. (Bloomberg)

The walls of London’s Serpentine Gallery are covered with the kind of color charts you find at a hardware store. Only these colors aren’t grouped by greens, blues or reds.
They are random, computer-generated combinations, arranged in grids and titled “4,900 Colors: Version II” by German artist Gerhard Richter.
Richter used the same random process to design a stained- glass window for Cologne Cathedral last year: 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass were produced in 72 colors. The Serpentine’s 49 panels can be displayed 11 ways, including one that shows them all side-by-side.
Richter, 76, has long been drawn to color grids. In the mid-1960s, while he was busy doing paintings based on photographs, he reproduced hardware-store color charts on a big scale.
During an interview yesterday at the gallery, Richter wore a dark jacket and open-collared blue shirt as he spoke candidly about paint samples, the art market and Damien Hirst, sometimes seeking help from a translator. With his close-cropped white hair and glasses, he looked like a college professor. (Bloomberg)

Buyers from the former Soviet Union and the Middle East were more active than those from the U.S. at Sotheby’s 111.5 million-pound ($199 million) auction of new work by Damien Hirst in London, said art dealers.
Ninety-eight percent of the 223 lots in Sotheby’s Sept. 15 and 16 “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale found buyers, generating a total that, with fees, exceeded the estimate of 65 million pounds to 98 million pounds. Twenty-four lots by the U.K. artist sold for more than 1 million pounds, said the auction house, which has its main salerooms in New York. Unusually, it did not release a geographical breakdown of buyers, saying that at this auction it was “proprietary” information. (Bloomberg)

While the world’s financial system totters, the shrewd money seems to be pouring into pickled unicorns and winged pigs. It is a striking and thought-provoking fact that on the same day that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed, the first session of Damien Hirst’s two-day auction at Sotheby’s, London, took off like a rocket.
The whole affair exceeded estimates by fetching 111.5 million pounds ($199 million). We seem to be living in apocalyptic times just now - thronged with sinister horsemen and seven-headed beasts - so what do these strange creations of Hirst’s portend?
Could this be Armageddon for a powerful section of the art market, namely the dealers, who appear to have been cut right out of the loop? Will the future be full of mega-sales of brand new art passing straight from the studio to the sale-room? Are the great galleries such as those of London’s Hoxton and Soho doomed like the woolly mammoths of old to extinction?
The probable answer is no. Far from such auctions being the art-sales model of the future, it seems quite likely that there’ll never be another one ever again. No other artist fulfills quite the same conditions as Hirst. (Bloomberg)